We are now just a tad under three years removed from the 40th anniversary of the release of Star Wars in 1977. In the thirty seven years since, it has spawned sequels, prequels, animated series, ripoffs, homages, and one very special holiday show. Thirty seven years prior to Star Wars, the most popular film of the year 1940 was Boom Town. Rounding out the top ten box office champs of the year were North West Mounted Police, The Great Dictator, The Philadelphia Story, The Grapes of Wrath, Rebecca, Strike Up the Band, Northwest Passage, The Fighting 69th, and The Sea Hawk. None of those were still thriving, hot properties in 1977. Probably not a one would have even been known to an average kid in 1977 (except maybe me and you but, let’s face it, we’re not average). However, go back just one year, to 1939, and both Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz were hot properties in 1977, at least on television. Go back forty years from 1977 and 1937′s top movie was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Animated Disney movies still rake in the big bucks, and Oscars, even now. Still, none have held on to the upper ranks of monetary power like Star Wars. One difference (but I stress, only one of many) is that it has been updated and regularly. What does that example mean for cinema and the future of the art form?
Make no mistake about where we are in cinematic history right now: We are at the beginning. Visual entertainment will evolve outward from here into true three dimensionality in the form of holograms or just movies that are implanted into your thoughts at the firing of a neuron as you purchase the latest blockbuster that you can see in your head as if you were inside the story itself. Right now, we’re not even close to that but cinema does move fast enough that it’s already evolved through several important stages in only a little over a century and some years. From shadow boxes to kinetoscopes to one reelers projected on screens to feature length to sound to color to digital, all in a relatively short span of time. Nonetheless, there are several centuries to go and we’re just past the first one.
Back in the mid-nineties, at the end of the first century of cinema, when George Lucas first made public his intention to digitally update his movies, some people cried foul. My view then and now was that they’re his movies and if he wants to update them, he should. Moreover, since cinema has always relied on technology for its very existence, why not update it as the technology advances? We update classics all the time by cleaning up the image digitally but Lucas did more than that: he changed visuals, added effects, even switched out actors (Sebastian Shaw’s ghost at the end of Return of the Jedi becomes Hayden Christensen).
Lucas recognized that, as revolutionary as his special effects seemed in 1977, they were looking their age in 1997 so he updated them as best he could. They’ve been updated again since and will probably be updated many more times over the next several years. Note that he updated the effects. He didn’t just add one thing that wasn’t used at the time of their release, like the colorization of movies. The idea that colorizing a black and white movie might update it is wrongheaded because adding color to a movie whose dialogue and attitudes signal a specific time period does nothing to update the movie at all. It just changes it from black and white to color but everyone still knows it’s an older movie. But what if you could update older movies in more ways than that? Would digitally inserting smart phones into the hands of Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint and changing the cars and clothes, digitally, to look like the cars and clothes of now, keep a classic movie like On the Waterfront financially thriving in popular culture? I not only say no but I implore anyone reading this with the ability to do so to never, ever do so. Most classics are classics precisely because they belong firmly to a specific place and time. Updating them directly, rather than updating through a remake, is a fool’s errand.
But what about other movies? The Wizard of Oz has no specific time and place. We know it was made in 1939 but there’s really nothing in the movie, technology wise, that says that. The rural Kansas setting is technology free so as to make it timeless and Oz is a fantasy land so, again, it’s timeless. Why not replace the backdrops with CGI rendered landscapes? Because while I find the idea of continuously updating Star Wars not only harmless but valid, I find the idea of updating older studio classics without the maker’s consent completely out of bounds. The difference is George Lucas. He’s here, he’s alive, he’s the one making the decision. I would even assume, having signed over everything to Disney, he has signed off on having them continuously update them. Thus, in perpetuity, the creator of the series has said, “Go ahead, update all you want.” For older classics, there is no still living creator to make that approval explicit. And so, for most movies made before the sixties, there won’t be anyone around to give the approval one way or another.
But what about now? What about Back to the Future, Part II? What if Robert Zemeckis decided, before next year, that he wanted to go in and digitally change the landscape of Part II, which takes place in 2015, to look like the actual 2015? What if he digitally inserted – and he could easily do all of this – people staring down at smartphones, taking selfies, and texting in the background? What if he nixed the hoverboard and flying cars because, hey, we now know those things won’t be commercially viable in 2015? What if he changed the Jaws 19 movie to a Transformer movie and had Michael J. Fox dub some new lines making a joke about it? If he did all this, would it matter? The fact is, when he made the first movie, he knew what 1985 and 1955 looked like. Now that he knows what 2015 will look like, so why not change it? Sure, keep the original as a fascinating “this is what we originally thought it was going to look like” version that people can watch over and over but for a re-release of all three in 2015 (which seems like a no-brainer), why not actually make the second installment take place in 2015? If Zemeckis the creator approved it, I say do it. If he doesn’t, hands off. The bigger question I’m getting around to here, of which I have no answer is, would it matter?
Going forward, I think the most successful films will be updated with regularity. Right now we’ve begun to see remake updates like we’ve never seen before. When a successful movie gets made now, a remake is often in the making less than a decade later. The early 2000′s brought Marvel comics great success with its Spiderman movies starring Tobey Maguire. Only ten years later, Andrew Garfield starred in a brand new series of remakes. It’s a way of continually updating a series without having to go back to the original. But for successful sci-fi or fantasy features, that exist out of place and time, like Star Wars, or The Lord of the Rings, I think regular updating and re-releasing will be the order of the day. I think as the technology improves, becoming cheaper, faster, and easier to use, immediately remaking a movie will become an alternative form of criticism, a way of saying, “Here’s what you should have done.” I think cinema, some of it at least, will become a lot more interactive, more malleable, less permanent. I’ve joked before that Blade Runner has more director’s cuts than it has frames but I think in the future that might be more common than not. The question won’t necessarily be, “Have you seen X” but rather, “Which version?” What that will mean for cinema and how we view it is for someone else to answer. I’m just here to ask the questions.
*This post will be updated regularly over the next 30 years as new information becomes available